The UK doesn’t “need more restaurants”, according to chancellor Rachel Reeves’s “entrepreneurship” adviser. I am reminded of this unhelpful and rhetorically graceless intervention from Reeves’s camp after hearing the sad news about Peploe’s on Dublin’s Stephen’s Green. We don’t “need” more restaurants? Not that I would expect the UK’s “we don’t need more restaurants” government to ever understand – as turgid and humourless as it is. I am glad about the Vat reduction here, it is at least evidence of a political class that cares.

Source: The Irish Times April 02, 2026 15:31 UTC